"Original inspiration for the story was not about linguistics. Originally I wanted to write a story about someone who knew the future, but was unable to change it. What sort of emotions that person might experience, knowing that both good things and bad things were going to happen, and not able to do anything about it? I had to figure out how to grant this protagonist ability to know the future. I toyed with a couple of possibilities: through meditative experience, through mind-altering drugs, some other experimental treatments? None of those seemed particularly interesting to me.
Then I remembered Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Learning a language and then being able to know the future -- that seemed a very interesting idea to me. It was only then that it became a story about linguistics.
At that time I didn't know a whole lot about linguistics, and I realized it was going to be a very difficult story to write. I thought I wasn't a good enough writer to write this story. I spent the next few years reading books about linguistics and working on my writing, and then finally I felt I knew enough about linguistics to fake it, and I was going to give it a try."
